V / A: Etnofest 1 Lucerna live 2003 - CD

On St. Martin's Day 2003, Prague trams brought unusually equipped girls and boys to the Lucerna Hall. Each person had a drum. Some belonged to the announced groups, but many were unknown enthusiasts, drawn, among other things, by the opportunity to eventually join the performers with their own bit of rhythmic passion. The Etnofest, a five-hour festival of ethnic music, was about to begin.
The brain, spirit, and inspiring voice of the entire evening, Ida Kelarová, acted with the same freedom as when she improvised with her younger sister Iva Bittová in the performances of Brno's Divadlo na provázku (Goose on a String Theatre) in the seventies. The concert thus fit into the current broad trend of ethnic music, in which the blurring of stylistic boundaries is more important than the boundaries themselves. This is why, for example, the group Romano Rat far exceeded the established notions of Romani music-making and approached jazz in its concept.
If twenty years ago anyone had called their composition Kuku reggae samba, they would have risked being accused of P.T. Barnum-style advertising. Today, as performed by the Tam-Tam Orchestra and the Afro-group TiDiTaDe, this mixture exudes unbridled, playful joy for joy's sake. And of course, within such a loose framework as the Etnofest, alongside pure amateur singing, the genre-versatile, technically refined, and highly stylised vocal mastery of Feng-Jün Song also fits and shines brightly. The violinist and composer Jiří Pavlica, whose path to the variability of Hradišťan and Talant led from a regional cimbalom band, the conservatory, and the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts (JAMU), must feel like a fish in water among such a congenial and sparkling community.
For every visitor, the peak of Etnofest was probably somewhere else, and it will be the same when listening to this recording. For me, the three female singers lifted me furthest from the consumerist frenzy and highest to the mountains of brightness. Ida Kelarová, already extraordinarily focused and turned inward in the song Joj mamo; Feng-Jün Song and Zuzana Lapčíková from the Dolňácko region, each on a different golden thread of her unique fragility, in Tibetan and Mongolian folk songs. And most of all, all three of them together in Chodila po poli. During their improvisation, I could believe that music must have a single common god for the whole world.
Jiří Černý

Tracklist

Le Man Peha / Užar tu čhaje / Te recuerdo asi (Spanish folk) / Balvaj Phurdel / Madara Pes / Pašo Pani / Čhaje, Čhoje / Mountain Duet (Chinese folk) / Raise the Silver Bowl (Tibetan folk) / Full Moon (Mongolian folk) / Joj mamo / Chodila po poli / Tam-TiDi-Tam / Brasil Echo / Kuku reggae samba / Vstávej